For many people who suffer from injuries, disease or congenital malformation, conventional footwear, such as shoes, cannot be worn at all, or cannot be worn, as is, without great discomfort, the risk of exacerbating the condition, or without aiding in recovery or alleviation of pain. There are others, who have normal feet or ones with only slight abnormalities who desire to or must adapt their feet to a wrong size or otherwise ill-fitting shoe. This sometimes happens when a person's sense of fashion triumphs over their common sense upon seeing a particularly attractive shoe at the store. Other times it happens when a person has bought a pair of shoes on a day when their feet were at an extreme from their average size, and now that the fit is found to be poor, the user cannot afford to or will not discontinue the wearing of those shoes. Yet other times it happens when a perfectly good pair of shoes stretches out or changes shape because the wearer got caught in a sudden rainstorm, or has feet which perspire enough to wet the shoes.
Accordingly, there has been engendered an industry of manufacturing special orthopedic footwear, custom shoes and various podiatric appliances, some of which are intended to be designed for and fitted to the afflicted person or to their footwear by podiatrists, orthopedists and related professionals, and others of which are mass produced and sold over-the-counter at shoe stores, pharmacies and the like.
From the present inventor's perspective the present state of the art is highly imperfect in that it provides at one extreme expensive, custom-made special footwear and appliances which few of the afflicted can afford or obtain even under public health or insurance company health benefit programs, and in that it provides at the other extreme often largely ineffective, often counterproductive, often self-prescribed, largely "one-size-fits-all", often flimsy pads, patches, and nostrums, many of which will not withstand being cleaned or being temporarily removed while the wearer bathes. Thus in the present state of the art, there appears to be a gap in the center, between what is too expensive to reach its natural market and what is too cheap to be effective.